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Pearls of Weber

A collection of posts by David Weber containing background information for his stories, collected and generously made available Joe Buckley.

Posted by David at 12:00am

Ships of the Wall and battleships

Series: Honorverse

Date: October 22, 2002

I trust it is apparent from above
why BBs are not expected to survive close combat with an SD. They simply cannot
carry the sidewalls, armor, internal subdivision, etc., to stand up to an SD's energy
batteries in a one-to-one duel, or even in equal tonnages. This is why the Peep BBs are
missile heavy, even though missiles are less effective than beams against a
hostile SD. Missiles are quite heavy enough to deal with BCs and below (which is what BBs
are really intended to fight), and in a stand-off engagement with standard (i.e., pre-pod)
missile armaments, a BB has a much better chance of surviving combat with an SD. The
chance is still slight in any one-for-one engagement, but equal masses of BBs can throw a
larger number of missiles and, hopefully, stay out of the energy envelope. The reason
Thomas Theisman took such losses at the Battle of Seabring was that he couldn't
stay outside the energy envelope and because he took a pounding from the Manty missile
pods on his way in to his own engagement range. The enormous difference between the
offensive and defensive mix of a proper ship of the wall and a BB is also why Honor's SDs
were able to shoot up the BBs of Operation Dagger in Yeltsin. (And if the Peep force
hadn't split up, she would almost certainly have taken out all of Theisman's BBs in the
initial exchange, as well, and probably without suffering much--if any--heavier losses
than she actually took.)

What a BB is (or was, pre-war) is the most effective system security
platform available. A BB is cheaper to build. The same tonnage will go twice as far in
terms of hulls. It cannot effectively fight a DN or an SD (although in cases of dire
emergency it can try to do so), but it is sudden death on anything smaller than
itself. And while it cannot match the acceleration of a BC or a CA, it can (assuming equal
compensator efficiency) generally stay between a raider and the critical areas of a system
and compel the raider to come to it. This is why the prewar Peeps--who had lots of systems
to defend against potential raids (not to mention other internal security concerns)--built
BBs in relatively large numbers while the prewar RMN, which had few systems to defend and
needed all the offensive firepower it could get, built only DNs and SDs for units above
the BC.